WordPress was built to be global scale from the beginning, says Mullenweg

Blog-publishing platform WordPress (see disclosure) has become a major player on the internet over the past few years — it powers almost 20 percent of the world’s websites, and according to Quantcast it just passed Yahoo in terms of traffic. And founder Matt Mullenweg says that even when the company was still tiny, it was already thinking about how it could build in the flexibility necessary to function at a global scale.

“We were founded on the belief that blogs would replace all of the media in the world — that was the thesis — so we thought from the beginning this needs to work at a high scale,” Mullenweg told attendees at Gigaom’s Structure Europe conference in London, during a conversation with Om.

Ironically, the WordPress founder said that much of the early development of software that would scale was almost an accident, because the company chose the wrong…